1. Technical Field
The present invention generally relates to Internet data transfers concerning electronic commerce and in particular to data transfers concerning recurring sales transactions between specific parties. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to incremental updates of Internet data transmitted between parties which conduct electronic sales transactions on a recurring basis.
2. Description of the Related Art
The global network of computers commonly known as the Internet or World Wide Web has seen explosive growth in the last several years, fueled largely by increasing focus of businesses on xe2x80x9ce-commerce,xe2x80x9d the performance of commercial transactions utilizing the Internet. The number of retailers who offer goods or services for sale utilizing the Internet (often referred to as xe2x80x9ce-tailersxe2x80x9d) is increasing rapidly. Moreover, e-commerce is expanding from predominantly business-to-consumer (xe2x80x9cB2Cxe2x80x9d) transactions into the area of business-to-business (xe2x80x9cB2Bxe2x80x9d) transactions.
A serious impediment for e-commerce retailers is the length of time required for information delivery over the Web. According to some surveys, home users must wait an average of thirty seconds to load Web pages from the most popular e-commerce sites. Business users, which typically have access to faster T1 connections, have been found to wait an average of eight seconds to load each page. Such delays are problematic for e-commerce retailers since shoppers generally do not like to wait for Web pages to download, and are reluctant to visit a site that requires long download times.
Long download times result not only from small bandwidth connections (e.g., 56 K dial-ups rather than T1 or DSL connections) and the large data sizes of graphics-intensive Web pages, but also from network congestion or server overload. Each request for a Web page from a customer""s system to a server and the associated response by the server consumes a portion of the finite bandwidth available for transferring data. Additionally, each request for a Web page which requires the full content of the Web page to be returned consumes a portion of the serving capacity of the Web site. Reduction of the amount of data required for at least some request/response transactions could ease traffic congestion and server loading problems.
It is therefore one object of the present invention to improve Internet data transfers concerning electronic commerce.
It is another object of the present invention to improve data transfers concerning recurring sales transactions between specific parties.
It is yet another object of the present invention to provide incremental updates of Internet data transmitted between parties which conduct electronic sales transactions on a recurring basis.
The foregoing objects are achieved as is now described. Ordering information required for recurring purchase of frequently purchased items, such as an HTML order form and item and pricing information, is cached within a customer""s data processing system separately from the browser cache. The item and pricing information includes an associated validity period and is incrementally (i.e., with finer granularity than the page) updated as necessary. Orders may thus be assembled on the customer""s data processing system with little or no communication with the retailer""s server, then transmitted to the retailer""s server for processing when complete, reducing network traffic and server loading for the recurring transactions.
The above as well as additional objectives, features, and advantages of the present invention will become apparent in the following detailed written description.